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All posts for the month September, 2012

This week BioWare relased Patch 1.4: Terror From Beyond. The main focus of this patch is the new Operation but along came some class balance tweaks, chest color match and hide head slot for companions, mood expressions, new PvE endgame gear, new PVP weapons among other small things.

This week during the maintenance period, BioWare proceeded to the announced server consolidation. After the free migration a few months ago, now all the characters from the origin servers are finally in the destination servers. Some people couldn’t move all their characters at the time of the free migrations due to lack of character slots but now all the characters are available again. Also, all the other players have now 12 slots for characters up from 8. From now on Legacy names are no longer unique and Guild names have a suffix with the name of the server where they were created in order to avoid name collision.

You can read the post about server consolidation on SWTOR’s official blog.

On another post, Ewen Vowels, Senior Client Optimization Engineer talks about the new optimizations on shadows. Until now the shadows in game were of low quality even on powerful machines where the limitation weren’t processing power but were on the used algorithms instead. This optimization will be visible on update 1.4 along with another tweaks on core components in order to reduce the load on our machines.

Head over to the this post in order to read the explanation on these optimizations.

Today ArenaNet announced a beta version of Guild Wars 2 for Mac. As this version is still in beta, some performance optimizations are still in development and final system requirements aren’t finalized. It’s good to see a game like this being released for Mac, a platform that many publishers just decide to ignore even when Macs are selling very well these days. If you already have an active Guild Wars 2 account, you can go to your account page and download the Mac client today!

A few days ago, ArenaNet talked about how it reimagined endgame stating that endgame experience is be something players can access throughout the leveling process. Besides that, there is still content to explore when players reach the cap in the form of eight dungeons and, for each one, three different paths to explore them. Also, for the big bosses vs. raid like groups lovers, there are several of these big guys scattered around Tyria. These bosses are usually found at the end of the larger dynamic events and provide loot chests when downed.

On another post, John Smith addresses the state of the economy with focus on the Trading Post, Supply and Demand, Exploits and provides some charts with data at the end of the post.

BioWare opened a new Play Test Server to test their new High Population Server technology. This tech will be deployed in the future to further accommodate characters still lingering in the origin servers as well as the new players coming later this year once the free to play option goes live.The test server is populated with character copied from US East Coast servers so, if you are somewhere else, you’re only be able to experience this technology later upon its release to live servers.